# Stickman video Skill: a creator with 14k followers, one star per new art style, 95 days to 4,500 stars · GitHub open source project

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/github/gh_kaomei__stickman-video-director.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
> For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt

> The stick-figure faceless channel trend is hot, and this project turns 'replicating a channel that can grow followers' into a free Skill. The author posts each time a new art style comes out and asks for a star, the README says 'unlock X at Y stars', and READMEs in 8 languages brought a second wave via overseas YouTube bloggers.

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

kaomei/stickman-video-director · kaomei

# Stickman video Skill: a creator with 14k followers, one star per new art style, 95 days to 4,500 stars

**What it is** An open-source Skill for Codex / Claude Code. Drop in a topic or script and it gives you stickman video storyboards and prompts, or auto-renders a finished video with voiceover and subtitles. Each art style is benchmarked against a YouTube channel that is already growing.

**Why it took off** Stickman faceless channels are hot, and it packages "clone a channel that already grows" as a free Skill. The author posted each new style and asked for a star. The README also says which star count unlocks what. README translations into 8 languages brought a second wave via overseas YouTube creators.

**B** **How you could ride this** Stop doing stickmen. Pick another faceless style or platform that has already been shown to grow (history-map satire, fight scenes, dark psychology, Douyin vertical). Tie each template to a real benchmark channel, ship it as a serial with new releases, ask for stars each time, and publish in both Chinese and English.

Grade B: the playbook is clear, and the author got traction with only 14k followers, so it's replicable. But video Skills are crowded (the collection lists 180), there's no technical moat, and it depends on an audience already wanting a side hustle plus months of consistent serial releases. People without both will struggle to follow it. What people in niche circles are saying

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-08-03 · 4,895 stars · 7 days +1,264

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-09 → 2026-11-08 (31 days, 30 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

In Aug 3, Chinese AI content creator 疯狂的烤妹儿 (Crazy Kaomei) spent a weekend turning the stickman animations popular on YouTube into a Codex / Claude Code Skill and open-sourced it. Over the next three months she released 10 art styles, posting on X each time and ending every post asking for a star. By Nov 6, the repo had 4,507 stars and 715 forks (live GitHub numbers). Below: what it is, where the stars came from, why similar projects stalled at a few hundred stars, and how to build one that gets stars.

### The first version, built in a weekend

The launch post read:

> Over the weekend I studied the stickman animations blowing up on YouTube and TikTok, many with hundreds of thousands of views, and Westerners love this style. So I turned the whole workflow into skills: drop in a script and it auto-generates animation prompts with English voiceover and sound effects... As usual, it's open source.

The post got 195 likes. The first version was minimal: input a script, get a storyboard and per-shot video prompts, then take them to Google Flow for generation and CapCut for editing.

The author goes by @CrazyKaomei on X. Her bio reads "focused on the minimum-friction path to a doable 'AI + content creation' business." She has about 14k followers, not a big account. Her followers are mostly people looking for an AI-powered side hustle in content creation, so anyone who sees her tool is likely to install it.

### What it can do now

The README's first line: "Turn any script into a multi-style stickman video that can go viral, for faceless YouTube channels." The next line: "100% free and open source. No camera, no $50/month subscription."

It currently has two modes:

- **A: Director mode** : outputs a direction plan, storyboards, and per-shot video prompts. You generate clips yourself in Flow, Runway, or Kling, then edit. Mainly for 30-second to 3-minute shorts.

- **B: Full auto mode** : runs in Codex or Claude Code. It auto-generates illustrations, voiceover, subtitles, sound effects, and micro-animations, then renders a complete video file. Aimed at 10+ minute long-form. The author notes: "For results closest to the examples, use Codex."

- Both modes can then produce a cover and a publishing kit: cover, 5 titles, description and tags, and a pinned comment.

There are 10 styles in total (Director mode A1–A6, full auto mode B1–B4). Most styles name the YouTube channel they're benchmarked against, along with that channel's growth numbers:

| Style | Benchmark channel named in the README |
|---|---|
| A3 Prehistoric Cave | @Zenn9.2M subscribers |
| A6 Amber Shadow | @IfverseTales, 3 gained 60k subscribers per week |
| B2 Colorful Hand-drawn | @PsychToonsHQ, 200k subscribers |
| B3 Retro TV | @BradikininVideos, 3 gained 55k subscribers per week |

So what it sells isn't "you can draw stick figures," it's "you can copy a channel that's already growing." In her Sep 22 X long post she makes the point directly: the title is "Viral Copy | YouTube minimalist stick-figure money-making pipeline," and the first subheading reads "The art is this crude, so how does this niche make 5～60k a month?"

Installation is simple: give the repo link to your agent and say "install this Skill for me." The default setup uses Google Flow's free quota plus the image generation built into GPT. The author also wrote a "free tier hacks" tutorial, so running cost is close to zero.

### Where the stars came from

It has never made GitHub's all-site trending page. It has only appeared intermittently in the top 25 of trendshift's Shell chart. Nearly all stars came from outside GitHub, driven mainly by the author's own posts. Each star spike lines up with one of her posts (daily star gains from trendshift):

| Date | Cumulative / daily star gains | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 08-03 | Repo created | Launch post, 195 likes |
| 09-06/07 | +68 that day, cumulative about 820 | 2.0 teaser: showed a YouTube channel screenshot with "34 videos, 180k subscribers, nearly 8M views per video," and said "open-sourcing in a few days, mark it if interested" |
| 09-17~19 | About +40 per day | Released 2.0 |
| 09-22 | — | X long post "Viral Clone," with a 0-cost pipeline for Codex + Flow + CapCut and a Doubao version |
| 10-10 | Cumulative 1,645 | Chinese AI megaaccount @xaiwind posted a long essay "Codex viral video skill, 10 installs to a million views," and this repo ranked #4 |
| 10-12/13 | +119 / +160 | Reposted after the previous post spread |
| 10-15 | +104, 23 PRs merged that day | Post on "1:1 clone" of a one-minute Douyin stickman video |
| 10-20/21 | +80 / +199 | Community contributor @leksautomate submitted a historical picture-book style; teaser for "one sentence to a 12-minute long video" |
| 10-23/24 | — | English YouTuber Maitis made an intro video (14k views); the author posted "Heard this stickman Skill got big overseas?... aiming for 10k stars" |
| 10-30/31 | +189 / +133 | Cover and publishing kit, plus the A6 Amber Shadow style, two posts with about 16k impressions each |
| 11-02~04 | +134 / +191 / +212 | Two new styles, B2 and B3; English YouTube "NEW Claude AI Can Make Stickman Youtube Videos" (7 thousand views) |
| 11-05 | Single-day +228, the highest of the whole run |  |
| 11-06 | 4,363 (as recorded in the repo that day) / 4,507 (live GitHub) | 7 gained over the last 1,064 days, with the first 7 days at 668, and it's still accelerating |

Breaking it down, four forces drove it:

**The author's serialized posting.** Third-party stats (xbangdan, 11-06) show she posted 30 times in 53 days, reached 490k impressions, and gained 3,613 followers. Almost every stickman post ends with "go give it a ⭐️ on GitHub."

**The README makes stars the unlock.** The hero reads "⭐ Star this project and get the next art style and features first." A "Road to 10,000 Stars" roadmap at the bottom: 1,000 stars shipped the Director Mode, 3,000 stars shipped Full Auto Mode, 5,000 stars unlock 5–10 new art styles and batch editing for Shorts / TikTok, 7,500 stars bring a library of 1,000 viral script prompts, 10,000 stars launch the web studio. The A7 column just says "5,000 Stars unlock." If you want the next art style, you have to star it first.

**Chinese AI creator circles pass it around.** @xaiwind, @amiaoapp (10-28), a Zhihu post "A godlike Skill……", CSDN tutorials, and Bilibili and YouTube tutorials in Chinese. This crowd loves content about making money, growing an account, and copying viral hits, and every art style comes with titles like that.

**The README is in 8 languages, which took it overseas.** English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Portuguese, Turkish and Indonesian. The second wave of stars after late October came from English YouTube "free AI tools" creators (Maitis, Success With Sam), Instagram reels, Korean and Vietnamese blogs, Reddit's r/BestGitHubRepos and r/claudeskills, and Skill directory sites like skills.sh.

Star-farming: I didn't check the starring accounts one by one that day. But the timing of the star growth lines up tightly with the posting dates, and the fork ratio of about 15% isn't low. It looks like real growth (inference).

### What the author gets out of it

The open-source library itself doesn't make money. It's the entry point for the author to grow a following and win paid work. In Oct 27 she posted a tweet tagged "Paid partnership" promoting Renoise MCP: "I tried recreating it with Codex many times and it never worked well... then I plugged in a Renoise MCP and had it running in 10 minutes". The top reply was "Wait, this is paid?" Her A6 example video is also tagged "Renoise MCP example". She also sells custom paid versions to clients. For readers, the takeaway: returns on projects like this come as reputation and followers, and the money has to be earned separately from that reputation.

### Who it's competing with

| Project | Launched | Scale (stars) | How it differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| alchaincyf/huashu-art-motion (Huashu) | 2026-10-06 | 6,316 | A general-purpose art animation Skill from a big Chinese AI account, 35 style cards; not stick-figure only, and not tied to a single channel |
| Vincentwei1021/anything2explainer, video-talkcraft | 2026-09 / 08 | 3,066 / 2,118 | Writes code with Remotion to render motion-graphic explainers, no character story |
| Alisa0808/vox-director | 2026-07-10 | 2,650 | Vox-style paper-collage explainers, requires a paid API |
| artemnovitckii/claude-animation-skills | 2026-11-01 | 402 | Only one of the 6 animation Skills is stick-figure, and it's clearly a later follower |
| stix, stick-figure-shorts, Stickman-Studio, whiteboard-book-video-skill | 2026-09~10 | Dozens to hundreds | Other stick-figure projects have only one style, and they go quiet after a single release |
| Web tools like StickReel | Not verified | Claims 5,000+ creators | Charges subscriptions starting at $19/month; its "no $50/month" pitch targets exactly this group |
| YouTube tutorials on "making stick-figure animation for free" | From ¥2026-09 | Single video at 120k views | Teach doing it by hand in Flow, competing for the same audience |

Two things stand out. First, video Skills are already crowded: one "Claude video Skill collection" has 180 entries. Second, technically it's no better than others: Flow prompts, voiceover and ffmpeg compositing are things anyone can do, and the rendering in Huasheng's and vox-director's projects is just as good. Several other stick-figure libraries aren't much weaker, but they all stall at a few hundred stars, because nobody keeps running them.

### What it still gets wrong

- **Getting a video out takes work.** Director Mode only gives prompts; you still have to generate and edit the video yourself. The author admits Full Auto Mode gives different results with agents other than Codex. From the outside you can't tell how many people actually finished a video.

- **Art styles are easy to copy.** A style is basically a set of prompts and examples, and someone can follow the README to build a close copy.

- **Its best results need a paid tool.** The author says that when she tried to copy a stick-figure channel that gained "2 55k followers a week," Codex "never got good results," and only a paid Renoise MCP got it working.

- **The roadmap promises a lot.** Batch editing, a script library, a web studio. If it can't deliver these, the expectation built up by "star to unlock" will turn against it.

### If it were you

**One-line verdict:** Another stick-figure Skill is pointless. That slot is already taken, and the ones that followed are stuck at a few hundred stars. What's worth learning is the playbook: pick a content style that has already been shown to grow followers and make money, turn it into a Skill, attach a real benchmark channel to every template, and release in a series.

**Who it suits:** People already posting about AI side hustles or creator business on X, Xiaohongshu or Bilibili, where a few thousand to tens of thousands of followers is enough. The author has only 14k. You need to be willing to ship a showcase video every week for several months.

**Who it doesn't suit:** People who just want to finish the code, push it to GitHub and wait for stars. That's how the similar stick-figure libraries got stuck at a few hundred. Anyone without their own distribution channel who isn't willing to run one. Anyone who wants to compete on technology or rendering quality: this category isn't about technology.

**How to do it:**

1. Pick a different faceless style. The author's own to-do list is ready-made: the history-map satire of OverSimplified, Alan Becker-style stick-figure fights, dark psychology silhouettes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley workplace satire, urban legend pencil sketches. She's penciled them in but hasn't made them yet, so whoever ships first and goes deeper has an opening (inference). You could also do other formats: whiteboard explainers, paper-cutout stop-motion, pixel-art history.

2. Tag every template with a channel and show its subscriber count or "weekly gain of X". That number becomes your post title.

3. Target a different platform or audience. Its Full Auto Mode leans toward landscape long-form for YouTube. Build a version for vertical Douyin and Xiaohongshu content, or for children's English or book-selling accounts (the paid custom work she takes includes book accounts).

4. Fix what it does badly: a Full Auto pipeline that doesn't need a paid MCP and produces reliable results in any agent, or batch-producing 30 Shorts at once.

5. Write a bilingual Chinese-English README on day one, with the example GIFs at the top. The English README is exactly the material overseas "free AI tools" creators are looking for, and they'll spread it for you.

**How to get stars:** Open the launch post with a specific channel and numbers ("34 videos, 180k followers, one video with nearly 8M views"). Each new template gets its own post with a demo video. The first screen of the README and the end of every post say plainly "star this," plus a roadmap of "what unlocks at how many stars." Find the "N must-install Skills" roundups from big Chinese AI accounts and get yourself into them. Once the English version is ready, register it on r/claudeskills and skills.sh.

**When to move:** As early as possible, and no later than early next year. Faceless channel art styles go stale, and "install a Skill to make videos" will be replaced by models that output video directly. The window for each style is roughly the stretch when the channels it benchmarks are still growing.

**Signs you've got it wrong:** The style you picked already has a Skill on GitHub with over a thousand stars. The channel you're benchmarking hasn't grown in the past month. After three or four templates, each post brings in only single-digit stars. That last one means your audience isn't the people looking for a side hustle, and a good playbook won't fix that.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/kaomei/stickman-video-director)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| alchaincyf/huashu-art-motion (Huashu) | Open source | 2026-10-06 | 6,316★ | General art animation Skill, 35 style cards, generates visuals with code; not stick-figure only, and not tied to specific channels |
| Alisa0808/vox-director | Open source | 2026-07-10 | 2,650★ | Vox-style paper-collage explainers, depends on the paid Atlas Cloud API |
| Vincentwei1021/anything2explainer / video-talkcraft | Open source | 2026-09 / 2026-08 | 3,066★ / 2,118★ | Remotion code-rendered motion explainers, not character narratives, not benchmarked to channels |
| artemnovitckii/claude-animation-skills | Open source | 2026-11-01 | 402★ | Only one of the 6 animation Skills is stick-figure, a later follower |
| bassimeledath/stix, deenukhan/stick-figure-shorts, saiedpod-bot/Stickman-Studio | Open source | 2026-09~10 | Tens to hundreds of ★ | Each has only one style, and none has an author keeping up the traffic |
| StickReel | Web | Not verified | Claims 5000+ creators, from $19/month | A subscription SaaS; this library's pitch is free, with no $50/month |
| Crreo / CutBay / svganimate / capturesai | Web | Not verified | Not verified | A general AI video tool with a stickman style included |
| Faceless.so / faceless.video / InVideo / Canva faceless video | Big-company features | Has existed for years | Big | General faceless video (stock footage or digital presenters), not stick-figure storytelling |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **Author's own X thread (@CrazyKaomei)** : 30 days, 53 posts, 490k impressions, 3,613 followers gained (xbangdan). 08-03 first post, 09-17 2.0, 09-22 long-form post, 10-20 style 5, 10-30 cover pack, 10-31 A6, 11-02 B2, 11-04 B3. Each one lines up with a spike in stars, and every post ends by asking people to star.

- **Verified** **README asks for stars (the star-unlock roadmap)** : "Road to 10,000 Stars": 1k/3k done, 5k unlocks new art styles, 10k brings the Web Studio. The A7 column says "5,000 Stars unlock."

- **Verified** **Reposted by big Chinese AI creator accounts** : @xaiwind's 10-10 long-form post "Codex viral video skill," item ④ is this library, followed by 10-12/13 gain +119/+160. @amiaoapp 10-28. Also Zhihu, CSDN, FYIPC.

- **Verified** **Overseas YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and Skill directories** : Maitis YouTube 10-23 with 14k views, Success With Sam 11-02 7k, an Instagram reel, Korean and Vietnamese blogs, r/BestGitHubRepos, r/claudeskills, skills.sh and more. README in 8 languages.

- **Verified** **The "copy a viral channel" narrative** : Each art style in the README is tagged with a benchmark channel (Zenn 0009 200k subscribers, IfverseTales 3 a week 60k, Bradikinin 3 a week 55k).

- Inference **GitHub trending** : Never made the site-wide trending list, only the Shell subsection on trendshift.

## Why kaomei/stickman-video-director took off

> Research date 2026-11-06. Channel: GitHub. Sources: our GitHub database (repo_profile / repo_day), the GitHub API, trendshift.io, xbangdan.com, the original X posts (read via r.jina.ai), the YouTube Data API, and various web pages. The GitHub stargazer endpoint was out of quota that day, so we didn't get per-star timestamps. Daily star growth uses trendshift data.

### Bottom line

This is a Codex / Claude Code Skill from Chinese AI creator "Crazy Kaomei" (X @CrazyKaomei, about 14k followers). Most of the stars came from her own back-to-back posts on X: each new art style got a post, each post asked readers to star, and the README says "star to unlock the next art style." Her angle is turning stick-figure art styles from YouTube channels already proven to grow followers and make money into templates. It rode two trends: 2026's second-half surge in stick-figure faceless channels, and the rise of Skill formats for coding agents. 8 language READMEs, plus a wave of overseas YouTube and Instagram reposters, then carried it into the English-speaking world.

### What it is

- An agent Skill you install into Codex / Claude Code / Cursor, plus Python scripts: enter a topic, article or script, get a stick-figure-style video.
    - **A. Director Mode** : outputs a directing plan, storyboard and video prompt for each shot. Users generate the clips in Google Flow / Runway / Kling and edit them themselves.
    - **B. Full Auto Mode** : inside Codex it automatically generates illustrations, voiceover, subtitles, sound effects and micro-animations, rendering a complete 10-minute-plus long video.
    - Also includes a "high-click cover + publishing kit" (cover, 5 titles, description / tags, pinned comment).

- There are 10 art styles (A1–A6, B1–B4). Most styles explicitly name a YouTube channel to copy: A3 copies @Zenn0009 (200k subs), A6 copies @IfverseTales (3 weekly gain of 60k subs), B2 copies @PsychToonsHQ (200k subs), B3 copies @BradikininVideos (3 weekly gain of 55k subs). (Source: GitHub README)

- MIT license, 100% free; the README pitches it as "no $50/month SaaS subscription."

### Growth data

- Repo created on 2026-08-03; the author's first post that day got 195 likes (source: topicdigg mirror). 2026-11-06 Our database recorded 4,363 stars / 680 forks; the live GitHub API value that day was 4,507 / 715. Fork-to-star ratio is about 15.6%.

- Growth came in stages:
    - By Sep 7, about 820 stars: trendshift recorded 9/7–11/6 with 3,685 gained in total, derived backward.
    - Oct 10, 1,645 stars: the figure from xaiwind's long X post.
    - Oct 16, 2,124 stars, Nov 6, 4,363 stars: our database.
    - Gained 1,064 in the last 7 days, 7 in the first 668 days, so it is accelerating. Single-day peak of 228, on 11-05 (our database).

- Every star spike lines up with one of the author's X posts. Dates were converted from post IDs; star gains come from trendshift:

| Date | Stars gained that day | what happened |
|---|---|---|
| 08-03 | Repo created | First post: "Over the weekend I studied the stickman animations that are huge on YouTube/TikTok… as always, it must be open source." |
| 09-06/07 | +68 | Posted a 2.0 teaser (a YouTube channel screenshot of "34 videos, 18w subs, nearly 8M views per video") |
| 09-17~19 | +43/+38/+40 | 2.0 launch post |
| 09-22 | — | X long post "Viral Recreation \| YouTube minimalist stickman money pipeline… one-click open source," with a 0 cost SOP using Doubao, Flow, and CapCut |
| 10-10 | — | Chinese AI account @xaiwind's long post "Codex viral video skill, 10 installs for a million views," where item ④ is this repo (1,645★ at the time) |
| 10-12/13 | +119/+160 | Continuing from the previous repost; 10-14 style 4 "healing story" style |
| 10-15 | +104, 23 PRs merged that day | Douyin one-minute stickman "1:1 recreation" post |
| 10-20/21 | +80/+199 | Style 5 "historical picture-book style" (a PR from community contributor @leksautomate); 10-21 posted a teaser for "one sentence to a 12-minute long video," asking people to star |
| 10-23 | — | English YouTube "This FREE Claude Code Skill Makes Stickman Animations" (Maitis, 14k views), with a simultaneous Instagram reel |
| 10-26 | +124 | 10-27 posted **paid partnership promos** for A6 and Renoise MCP |
| 10-30/31 | +189/+133 | "YouTube high-CTR thumbnail & one-click publishing toolkit" (16k impressions), and A6 warm-gold shadow style (16k impressions, the recent high) |
| 11-02~04 | +134/+191/+212 | B2 colorful hand-drawn style, B3 retro TV style; 11-02 English YouTube "NEW Claude AI Can Make Stickman Youtube Videos" (7k views) |

- Never made GitHub's sitewide trending (our database trending_days_any = 0); it only intermittently ranked in the top 25 of trendshift's "Shell" language chart. So the star growth did not come from trending exposure but from off-platform referrals.

### Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| alchaincyf/huashu-art-motion (Huashu) | Open-source Skill | 2026-10-06 | 6,316★, 7 days, gained 562 | A general "art animation" Skill from a major Chinese AI-community account, with 35 style cards that generate frames in code; not specialized in stickmen and does not copy any specific channel |
| Alisa0808/vox-director | Open-source Skill | 2026-07-10 | 2,650★ | Makes Vox-style paper-collage explainer videos, relying on the paid Atlas Cloud API |
| Vincentwei1021/anything2explainer, video-talkcraft | Open-source Skill | 2026-09 / 08 | 3,066★ / 2,118★ | Uses Remotion to render motion explainer videos in code; not character-driven storytelling |
| zhuyansen/awesome-claude-video-skills | Open-source index | 2026-09-27 | 1,617★ | A collection of video Skills, showing this category of Skill is already crowded |
| artemnovitckii/claude-animation-skills | Open-source Skill | 2026-11-01 | 402★ | 6 animation Skills, including stick figure and minimalist line art, clearly followers |
| deenukhan/stick-figure-shorts, bassimeledath/stix, saiedpod-bot/Stickman-Studio, nutllwhy/whiteboard-book-video-skill | Open source | 2026-09~10 | Tens to hundreds of ★ | Other Skills and pipelines that also make stickman videos, each with only one style and no creator consistently driving traffic |
| StickReel(stickreel.com) | Web SaaS | Not verified | Claims 5000+ creators; after trial, from $19/month | One-click stickman Shorts, sells subscriptions; this repo's pitch against it is "free, no $50/month" |
| Crreo, CutBay, svganimate, capturesai, Mage faceless video skill | Web / SaaS | Not verified | Not verified | General text-to-video or faceless tools that include a "stickman style" |
| Faceless.so, faceless.video, InVideo, Canva faceless video | Web / big-tech features | Has existed for years | Big | General faceless videos using stock footage or avatars, not stickman storytelling |
| YouTube tutorials on "making stickman animations for free" (zapiwala ai and others) | Item | From ¥2026-09 | Single video at 120k views | Teaches people to do it manually with Flow, competing for the same audience |

Summary: plenty of products do the same thing. SaaS charges monthly; open-source peers mostly have one style and ship once, then stop with no ongoing operation.

### Growth tactics (evidence)

1. **The author serializes on X personally (confirmed, main channel)** : @CrazyKaomei posts 30 times a day, 53 posts, 490k impressions, 3,613 new followers (xbangdan 11-06). Almost every stickman post ends with "go star it on GitHub ⭐️" or "don't forget to Star," and star spikes line up one-to-one with post dates (see table above).

2. **Deliberately asking for stars (confirmed)** : the README says "⭐ Star the project to catch the next style drop," and includes a "Road to 10,000 Stars" roadmap: 1k unlocks director mode, 3k unlocks fully automatic, 5k unlocks 5–10 new styles and batch editing, 10k goes to a Web Studio. A7 says "unlocks at 5,000 Stars." Stars are treated as the gate for unlocking new features.

3. **Chinese AI self-media circles reposting each other (confirmed)** : @xaiwind's long post on 10 video Skills (10-10), @amiaoapp (10-28), a Zhihu post "A godlike Skill…", a CSDN tutorial, FYIPC (08-03), and a Chinese YouTube tutorial (小袋鼠KAKO, 11-02).

4. **Overseas spread via the multilingual README (confirmed)** : the README has 8 languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Portuguese, Turkish, and Indonesian. Overseas reposts actually seen include: English YouTube Maitis (10-2.31M views) and Success With Sam (11-02,7k), an Instagram reel (10-23), a Facebook video, a Korean Threads post, a Korean jarvisstudio blog (10-31), Vietnamese tino.vn, Reddit r/BestGitHubRepos and r/claudeskills, an English blog at themenonlab (09-03), plus a dozen-plus Skill directories such as skills.sh, TypingMind, skillsmp, and the 360 skill hub.

5. **Copying viral channels, framed as "recreation" (confirmed)** : each style carries a real YouTube channel with a "gains X0k followers a week" hook. "Make money, grow your account" framing gets shared most easily in Chinese self-media circles.

6. **Community PRs and contributor credit (confirmed)** : A5 was contributed by @leksautomate; 10-15 merged 23 PRs in one day (trendshift), and the README also invites people to submit their work.

7. The author's own monetization, unverified: the paid-partnership promo for Renoise MCP (with a utm discount link, marked "Paid partnership" on X), plus "custom versions for paying clients" (product placement for book publishers). The open-source repo is her funnel for followers, promo deals, and custom work.

### Why it took off

- **The demand already exists** : 2026 stickman faceless channels are huge on YouTube and TikTok. The channels the author cites each gained 5–60k subscribers in 3 weeks; zapiwala ai's stickman long-form tutorial has 120k views; and people on Reddit r/SmallYoutubers debate whether the niche is worth it. The product sells "recreating a style that makes money," not an animation tool.

- **The format is timely** : Codex / Claude Code Skills were the most shareable open-source format in the second half of 2026. Installation means having the agent read a link, so the barrier is low; during the same period many video Skills appeared, and awesome lists collected 180 of them.

- **Cost is nearly 0** : it runs on Google Flow's free credits plus GPT's built-in image generation by default, and the author wrote a "free-tier hacks" tutorial. Compared with SaaS at $19–$60 a month, it draws beginners who want to test things cheaply.

- **Ships new versions constantly, each one a fresh exposure** : 10 styles in 3 months, plus a fully automatic mode and a cover pack. Each new feature gets its own post and another star request, so the curve climbs in waves instead of decaying after one launch.

- **The author has her own audience, and followers and users are the same people** : 14k followers and 490k impressions in 30 days. That is not a big account, but the followers are already people looking for an AI self-media side hustle, so they install when they see it.

- **Internationalization came early** : 8 README languages plus an English landing page let English YouTube / Instagram "free AI tools" creators cover it directly. The second wave of stars (after 10-23) came this way.

### Differentiation

Its difference is in the **content layer, not the technical layer** . Technically, the Flow prompts, TTS voiceover, and ffmpeg compositing pipeline are something anyone can build; 花叔, vox-director, and anything2explainer have rendering capabilities no weaker than it. It differs in three ways:

1. It covers only one subject, stickmen, and builds it out into 10 styles.

2. Each style is tied to a YouTube channel already proven to grow and earn, shifting the pitch from "can make animations" to "can recreate viral channels."

3. It bundles viral script structure, a 3-second hook, covers, and titles, covering everything from topic selection to publishing.

These differences are real reasons it took off, but they are only half the story; the other half is the author's sustained X operation and the star-asking tactics. Comparable open-source stick-figure repos are not bad, but nobody promoted them through serialized posts like this, so they stalled at tens to hundreds of stars.

### What to borrow

- **Anchor to a real channel that earns money** : the Skill isn't selling features, it's selling a recreation of a channel already proven to make money, and that hook travels best.

- **Keep shipping new styles or templates** : write each update as a post with a demo video; a "stars unlock X" roadmap can tie stars to what users are waiting for.

- **Write the README in multiple languages from the start, and put the demo GIF at the very top** : overseas 'free AI tools' bloggers will spread it for free.

- **Default to the free tier, and explicitly compare against paid SaaS prices** : a line like 'no $50 a month' is the most persuasive for beginners.

### Still unclear

- How many people are actually using it: the fork rate of 15% is high, but installing a Skill doesn't require a fork; install counts on skills.sh were not obtained.

- Whether stars were bought: the GitHub stargazer API hit its daily quota, so star account quality wasn't checked. Star growth pace closely matches posting times, the fork ratio looks normal, and the suspect flags in our database are empty, so it looks like organic growth, but this isn't fully verified.

- How many stars come from the Reddit posts (403 couldn't be read) versus English YouTube respectively can't be separated.

- The launch dates and real scale of SaaS products like StickReel are unverified.

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.